Early bloomer

Berea College Special Collections and Archives

Robert Maynard Hutchins in his Woodbridge Hall office in 1923. He became secretary of the university in 1922 at age 23. View full image

One hundred years ago this spring, Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) earned his LLB from Yale Law School at age 26. While there’s nothing unusual about that in itself, Hutchins completed his law degree while serving as one of Yale’s top officials: secretary of the university.

Hutchins, a 1921 Yale College graduate, had been appointed secretary in 1922. To get his law degree, he arranged to take early morning and late afternoon classes so as not to interfere with his duties as secretary. He also got credit for research projects he did for Law School faculty in his off hours. Hutchins graduated at the top of his class and was immediately hired to teach at the school while still serving as secretary.

It wouldn’t be the last time Hutchins achieved a lofty post at a young age. In 1927, he was appointed acting dean of the Law School, then permanent dean a year later. A few months after his 30th birthday in 1929, he became president of the University of Chicago.

Armed with a keen intellect, rhetorical skill, and confidence (more than one person called it arrogance), Hutchins made his reputation by trying to impose sweeping institutional change. He was frequently successful, but perhaps just as frequently foiled by his impetuosity and impatience.

Hutchins was raised in a Puritan-tinged moral and intellectual culture. His father, William James Hutchins, was a Presbyterian minister who had graduated from Yale College in the Class of 1892. While Robert Hutchins was still a boy, his father went from a pulpit in Brooklyn to a faculty position at Oberlin College. (In 1920, the elder Hutchins became president of Berea College in Kentucky; Robert’s brother Francis would succeed their father in that position.) Robert went to Oberlin for his first two years of college, then joined the US Army Ambulance Corps and served in Italy during World War I. When he returned in 1919, he transferred to Yale.

Hutchins was popular and successful at Yale; he was voted most likely to succeed, tapped for Wolf’s Head, chosen as Class Orator, and selected for the DeForest Prize for oratory (as his father had been). But after his time at Oberlin, a bastion of Calvinist rigor, he found Yale undemanding and frivolous. “The Yale of my day was a place where you could get excited about girls or liquor or parties or athletic contests,” he would later recall, “but it wasn’t a place where you’d get excited about learning.”

But just as Hutchins was graduating, Yale was welcoming a new president who might lead the university in a new direction. James Rowland Angell was the first non-alumnus to lead the university since colonial times, a Midwestern psychology professor from a state university background who was hired to modernize a university dominated by its undergraduate college. After an unhappy year teaching at a boarding school, Hutchins was tapped by Angell for secretary, a position where he would oversee the university’s fundraising, alumni relations, and Corporation matters, in addition to serving as the president’s right hand.

Hutchins was clearly not interested in a long-term career as secretary, though. Within two years of graduating from the Law School, he was running it. Hutchins brashly sought to remake legal education, bringing social science into the study of law at Yale as part of a movement called legal realism. He recruited new faculty with an interest in this empirically based approach, most notably future Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas.

After only two years in the deanship, Hutchins got the call to Chicago that made him a national figure. Tasked with strengthening the undergraduate college in an institution that had been defined from the beginning by research and graduate study, Hutchins abandoned his interest in the social sciences for a new pedagogical direction. Under the tutelage of another enfant terrible, the Columbia philosophy professor Mortimer Adler, Hutchins wanted to create a common curriculum for Chicago undergrads based on the idea of a canon of timeless texts, the so-called Great Books.

Hutchins helped popularize the idea of a set of books that everyone should read, leading the publication of Great Books of the Western World, a 54-volume set published by Encyclopedia Britannica in the 1950s. He never was able to establish a purely Great Books–based course of study at Chicago (though he did institute a common curriculum), but he helped develop one at St. John’s College in Maryland as a member of its board.

After 21 years at Chicago, Hutchins spent the rest of his life in the nonprofit realm of ideas: at the Ford Foundation, then at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, a think tank in Santa Barbara, California, that he founded in 1959. At a dinner honoring Hutchins in 1972, his former aide Milton Mayer mused on his early promise and mixed success. “I know he has not succeeded in changing the world,” Mayer said, “but I know something much more marvelous than that: I know that the world has not succeeded in changing him.”